: With the incredible technology that we have today, why is it still impossible to have 100% accuracy on predicting the weather?
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Here’s how I would ELI5:
Take two cups of water. One hot, one cold. Put a couple drops of food coloring into the hot water and mix it.
Now, pour both cups into a bowl. There will be swirls, vortexes, things will happen and eventually, they’ll mix.
The thing is, every time you do this, it will look different. The swirls will be in different locations, some will be bigger, some will be smaller. You can do this 1,000 times and no two swirls will be exactly the same. You can generally predict that the hot water will rise and the cold water will fall, but the exact locations are different every time.
Let’s say that there’s an ant at the bottom of the bowl. This ant really doesn’t like the food coloring. If he gets coloring on him, it’ll ruin his day. Can you accurately predict where and when the food coloring will reach him?
The bowl in this example can represent an entire state, or country, or even continent. There are a bunch of areas of varying pressures, densities, humidities, and temperatures, all interacting with each other. There are extremely powerful supercomputers who are constantly fed data from weather centers, airports, and weather balloons from all around the world, but because of the complexity of the system, even the computers can’t agree (think of the “spaghetti plots” you see in hurricane predictions)
We’re all like tiny ants, in a bowl with 50 different kinds of food coloring, at 50 different temperatures, that’s spinning, and we want to know whether or not the conditions are perfect to make water droplets form in mid-air and fall from the sky.
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